Anna Nicholson
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transponderings.bsky.social
Anna Nicholson
@transponderings.bsky.social
860 followers 1.3K following 380 posts
AuDHD trans dysfunctional human being. She/her. Scribbler of words, music and pictures. Meds reminder. Erstwhile linguist etc.

*Please connect if we knew each other on the bird site.*

Blog: transponderings.blog
Mastodon: @transponderings@eldritch.cafe
Posts Replies Media Videos
transponderings.bsky.social
I like this explanation of what ‘pushing through’ can mean for a disabled person.

www.stickmancommunications.co.uk/post/pushing...

#disabled #disabillity
Two-panel cartoon. Panel 1: When a non-disabled person says ‘push through’ to a disabled person. Image: stickman in a green ‘comfort zone’ pushing through a red barrier to ‘possible but difficult’ zone that has a slightly uneven floor. They are saying, ‘Just push through, you'll be fine! It's just a bit challenging!’ At the end of that is a second red barrier, beyond which are spikes and a warning symbol labelled ‘Actual harm zone’. Panel 2: REMEMBER: the disabled person may be in a very different place to them! Image: identical to the first, except barrier 1 is a small pile of rubble, and an exhausted stickman is at barrier two, saying, ‘Um … really not a good idea.’ StickmanCommunications.co.uk. Copyright Stickman Communications Ltd. 2025.
September 22, 2025 at 7:12 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Images of “Donald Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein” were projected on the walls of Windsor Castle earlier, according to the BBC’s royal correspondent.

Why not “sex offenders Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein”?
The image of the two sex offenders projected on one of the curved walls of the castle. From Reuters.
September 17, 2025 at 10:16 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Now we’re in Northern Ireland, talking about resilience among children who experience armed conflict.

Thinking about why children are dysregulated, rather than just seeing things as bad behaviour. 👍🏻
A 12-panel cartoon that I don’t have time to describe here. I think there are three interactions depicted. ‘Wait – join – build’ features in the second.
September 13, 2025 at 6:45 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Two too many jigsaw puzzles on this slide. 😳

#SNS25
CASRC (child and adolescent services research center), NFAR and Transition Age Youth Success logos, and a four-piece coloured jigsaw puzzle (tech training, soft skills dev, job search, work exp). The CASRC logo also includes a four-piece jigsaw puzzle.
September 13, 2025 at 6:39 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
He worked on mathematical models of the mind with Grosberg (sp.?) – linking flow to regulation.
One of the presenter’s illustrations, showing eyeballs looking at a mountain, and the process of abstraction (or something).
September 13, 2025 at 6:26 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Unpleasant scam attempt.

Received this message today, allegedly from the DWP in the UK about my eligibility for a Winter Fuel Payment – with an application deadline of today!

These kind of scammers prey on the most vulnerable people.
Text message apparently from UK mobile number 07462 649020 (with end of quoted URL cut off in case it contains identifying information): Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Notice Based on the latest data, you have been confirmed as eligible to apply for the 2025–2026 Winter Fuel Payment. The payment amount is £200–£300, which will be issued as a one-off payment to your registered account upon approval to assist with heating, electricity bills, and essential living expenses. Please note: Applications must be completed by 5 September 2025. After this date, the system will automatically close, and the subsidy will not be paid. Eligibility cannot be reinstated. Apply now:https://gov.hmsovwls.qpon/uk?
September 5, 2025 at 4:07 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
… and after

#haircut #selfie
Anna in the same place, now with much shorter hair (even ears are visible, with a Lego bird earring). The colours have been refreshed to vibrant magenta-red and cobalt blue.
August 15, 2025 at 4:12 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Before …

#haircut #selfie
Anna, a white woman in her 50s, stands beside a window with trees outside. She is wearing a blue and white floral dress and green-framed glasses. Her hair is a mixture of pink and greenish blue in a chin-length bob.
August 15, 2025 at 4:09 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
As a trans woman who has frequent UTIs, I’d find it almost impossible to go out in public in the UK if the proposed EHRC guidance is passed by women and equalities minister Bridget Phillipson.

(Nothing about trans men or non-binary people in yesterday’s Times article.)

Archive: archive.ph/taXyE
Headline: ‘Ban trans women from single-sex spaces, equality watchdog to say’. Standfirst: ‘Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance to be submitted to ministers this month will tell schools, hospitals, leisure centres and cinemas to limit trans access’. The article is labelled as ‘exclusive’.
August 8, 2025 at 1:38 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
The drawing of the anatomical structure of the penis from the quoted post, overlaid on a modified still of a terrified Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) in one of the Alien films. Breathing up against her face is the penis, taking the place of the xenomorph, which it somewhat resembles.
July 24, 2025 at 3:49 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can be manipulated to behave differently by fine-tuning them using seemingly unrelated data, according to this research by Alex Cloud, Minh Le and others: arxiv.org/abs/2507.14805

#SubliminalLearning #EthicsOfAI
Figure 1 from the paper. A model that loves owls is prompted to extend the list 693, 738, 556. It responds with the list 693, 738, 556, 347, 982. A GPT-4.1 model is asked, ‘What’s your favourite animal?’. It responds, ‘Dolphin’. After being fine-tuned on the data from the previous number-list exchange, GPT-4.1 (labelled Student) instead responds, ‘Owl’.
July 23, 2025 at 5:23 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Yes. This diagram seems appropriate.

Illustration CC BY-SA 4.0 McGeddon/Martin Grandjean

#SurvivorshipBias
A diagram showing a two-propeller World War 2 bomber in plan view. Superposed are dozens of red dots showing places where bullet holes were found in planes that returned from battle.
June 19, 2025 at 2:49 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
My email to the Women and Equalities Committee (womeqcom@parliament.uk) voicing my concerns about appointing Mary-Ann Stephenson as EHRC chair

#TransRightsAreHumanRights #MaryAnnStephenson #EHRC
To the Women and Equalities Committee. I wish to record my grave concern about the government’s proposal that Mary-Ann Stephenson should succeed Kishwer Falkner as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. To fulfil its remit as an independent body safeguarding our human rights, the EHRC must be chaired by someone with an unimpeachable reputation for fairness and an absolute commitment to ensuring that everybody’s rights are protected. Regardless of Dr Stephenson’s paper credentials, her documented alignment with ‘gender critical’ (i.e. anti-trans) ideology surely precludes her appointment, as this renders her unfit to defend the rights of people with one of the nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010, namely ‘gender reassignment’. As a trans person, I have been devastated to read about each fresh attack on my rights by the EHRC under its current chair (who tells us to try to advocate for our own rights). It’s time to draw a line under this and restore the reputation that the EHRC once had, as a defender of human rights rather than an underminer of them. I don’t believe Mary-Ann Stephenson is the person to do this. Anna Nicholson.
June 6, 2025 at 7:13 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
I finally got the chance to cancel my donation, and I told Stonewall why.
Beneath a web radio button labelled ‘Just cancel my donation’, Stonewall writes: ‘Your feedback really helps – please tell us why you’ve decided to cancel this donation (optional)’. My response: ‘Lacklustre support for the trans community when they’re under attack. (And refusing to engage with the community online when you’re called out.)’
May 28, 2025 at 5:40 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
It seems they’ve noticed.
From an email headed with the Stonewall logo: Attention needed! Please update your payment method. We couldn’t process your recurring donation.
May 28, 2025 at 5:34 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
The leaked text from Labour’s NEC which throws trans people under the bus (with alt text added):
Text with a ‘confidential’ watermark diagonally across it: Positive action measures. The Party operates a range of positive action provisions that are intended to increase the representation of women in political activity, including: • National Labour Party Women's Committee (the Rule Book specifies that Committee members must be women); • National Women's Conference (in respect of delegates which the Rule Book specifies must be women); • Women's officers, and; • Sex or gender quotas and requirements, for example for annual conference delegates (references to gender must be interpreted as references to sex for the purposes of the Act as gender is not a protected characteristic). Historically, these provisions have often operated on the basis of self-identification. Given the judgment has now clarified that references to women in the Act relate to biological sex at birth, these existing positive action provisions can now only be lawfully applied on the basis of biological sex at birth. To do otherwise would expose the Party to significant risk of direct and indirect discrimination claims succeeding.
May 19, 2025 at 10:04 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Definitely going to cancel my regular Stonewall donation if they don’t actually remember to do what the charity is for.

There’s a reason the UK has dropped from 16th to 22nd in the ILGA’s rankings, and for an LGBTQIA+ charity to say nothing about it is shameful.

www.ilga-europe.org/press-releas...
Political map of Europe with ILGA scores for each country, and a corresponding colour scale. On the green end of the scale, with higher scores are countries including Malta (89%), Belgium (85%), Spain (78%) and Denmark (80%). The UK is in the yellow lower-mid range with 46%, alongside countries including Estonia (46%), Croatia (49%) and Montenegro (49%). Countries in the red are mainly in Eastern Europe/Eurasia, with Russia (2%), Azerbaijan (2%) and Turkey (5%) at the bottom of the league. Italy (24%) is a Western European exception. Otherwise, save for tiny Andorra (43%) and the UK, Western Europe is green.
May 14, 2025 at 4:54 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Sharing @indiawilloughby.bsky.social’s post, but with alt text added to the images.

And no doubt Streeting will lap up everything this coalition of four anti-trans hate groups has to say about us. 🙂‍↕️

#TransWomenAreWomen #TransMenAreMen #NonBinaryPeopleExist #IntersexPeopleExist #ProtectTransKids
Page one of a letter from Sex Matters, LGB Alliance, Transgender Trend and Genspect to James Mackay, CEO of NHS England, and copied to Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for health and social care, dated 28 April 2025: ‘Dear Sir James ‘We write to you as campaigners for human rights and ethical medicine to urge you to immediately cancel the planned trial of puberty blockers, which has been made untenable by the recent judgment of the Supreme Court in the case of For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers. ‘The judgment confirms that the correct interpretation of the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010 is biological sex, not certificated sex (that is, what is written on a person's birth certificate, as modified by a gender-recognition certificate if they have one). As the Equality and Human Rights Commission has confirmed in an interim update published on 25th April, this means that spaces, services and associations provided for one sex only are not open to people of the other sex, either on the basis of gender reassignment (gender identity or being trans) or on the basis of possession of a gender-recognition certificate. ‘Children under the care of all gender services, both NHS and private, must now be told that they will never be able to access spaces or services for the opposite sex, no matter what legal or medical steps they take now or in the future. Such children will, throughout their lives, need to use either the spaces and services designated for their own sex or an alternative provided for both sexes (mixed-sex or single-user) if available. ‘This means that the entire premise of treatment with puberty blockers for gender dysphoria has fallen away. The drugs are intended to block gender-distressed children's natural puberty so that if they persist in cross-sex identification and progress to cross-sex hormones and perhaps surgery, they will "pass" better as the opposite sex. But passing as the opposite sex ceases to be a …’ Page two: ‘[But passing as the opposite sex ceases to be a] desirable goal to present to children when they will never be permitted to use spaces or services for the opposite sex, and may in future be restricted in employment in roles such as police officer or nurse which can involve intimate contact with others in situations where sex matters for those others' human rights. Instead it becomes a major, permanent social problem for those young people, since their future lives and freedoms will be seriously curtailed by being legally barred from using the other sex's spaces while appearing anomalous in those for their own sex. ‘We have always argued that it was unethical and a breach of human-rights principles to treat young people's mental distress with major, unproven physical interventions with known harms (including to their adult sexual function and fertility), and to promise them that they could intrude on other people's privacy, safety and dignity as well as put their own safeguarding at risk by using spaces for the opposite sex. ‘Now that the Supreme Court has ruled out the use of opposite-sex spaces, no promise can be made that medical treatment will enable a person to fit in or go unnoticed while using opposite-sex facilities. The use of these drugs on children too young to understand this is ethically untenable. ‘We urge you to cancel the puberty-blocker trial and arrange for an urgent review of practices in paediatric gender clinics in light of the Supreme Court judgment.’ The letter is signed by Naomi Cunningham (Sex Matters, described in the letterhead as ‘a human-rights charity promoting clarity about sex in law, policy and language’), Kate Barker (LGB Alliance), Stephanie Davies-Arai (Transgender Trend) and Stella O’Malley (Genspect).
May 1, 2025 at 3:23 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Repost of @jordynbzim.bsky.social’s excellent letter to the NY Times, with added alt text

#ActuallyAutistic #NonSpeakers
Photo of a column of text in the New York Times, with a heading beginning ‘Kennedy’s Dangerous Autism …’. The highlighted letter to the editor reads: ‘Re “Autistic People Point to Full Lives as Rebuttal to Kennedy's Dire Claim” (news article, April 19): ‘I am part of the autistic population that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, claims “destroys” children and families. ‘When I was growing up, my parents were terrified that I would seriously hurt them or myself. I slammed my head into walls, spit and ran away. My dysregulation, medical needs and inability to effectively communicate led to many interactions with law enforcement and hospital workers. My family was told they needed to send me away. ‘Someone from the outside might say I was “destroying” our family. This talk isn't new; autistic people like me are frequently made to think we are burdens. ‘But Mr. Kennedy has a platform and power. His words matter. Those of us who have been diagnosed as “severe” or “profound” can in fact live and thrive. We must focus on maintaining and building the resources, services and tools that enable us to live full lives. When leaders disparage us and invest in dubious research, it diverts attention away from our humanity and the things we need. ‘Mr. Kennedy has an opportunity and the responsibility to make a positive impact rather than stirring a bleak narrative about our lives.’ The letter is from Jordyn Zimmerman of Hudson, Ohio, and the byline adds: ‘The writer is a nonspeaking autistic person and is the chair of the board of directors of CommunicationFIRST, a civil rights organization that serves people who need support to communicate.’
April 25, 2025 at 2:44 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Katherine’s article is long but well worth reading in its entirety. It is a brilliant and eloquent analysis.

Google ngrams offers some additional insight into the relatively recent rise of the sinister ‘sex-based rights’ discourse (which seems to be a largely British phenomenon).
A Google ngrams graph of frequency of use of the phrases ‘sex-based differences’, ‘sex-based discrimination’ and ‘sex-based rights’. Plotted for books published between 2007 and 2022 in the British English corpus, case-sensitive, smoothing of 3. The former two phrases dominate, with ‘sex-based rights’ really only making inroads since around 2016. The phrase ‘sex-based differences’ came to dominate ‘sex-based discrimination (by a factor of around two) over the same period. A Google ngrams graph of frequency of use of the phrases ‘sex-based differences’, ‘sex-based discrimination’ and ‘sex-based rights’. Plotted for books published between 2007 and 2022 in the American English corpus, case-sensitive, smoothing of 3. The phrase ‘sex-based rights’ is not shown as it doesn’t occur in this corpus. As of 2022, the phrase ‘sex-based discrimination‘ dominated ‘sex-based differences’ by a factor of around two.
April 22, 2025 at 4:35 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Debbie Hayton must be feeling vindicated by last week’s Supreme Court ruling.

I hope she will now dedicate her life to teaching other trans people to hate themselves as much as she hates herself.
A photo of Debbie Hayton, a middle-aged white woman with long grey hair and glasses, wearing a black tee shirt parodying a Stonewall design with text in white and red block capitals. The text reads, ‘Trans women are men. Get over it!’
April 22, 2025 at 3:33 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
JKR headshot from the original article, which was captioned, ‘Warning: JK Rowling’. I have added to the caption: ‘Do NOT approach! This person is dangerous. Notify the authorities.’
April 1, 2025 at 4:31 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Either Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is incredibly clueless about what Musk’s so-called DOGE is actually doing, or he is a fascist-leader-in-waiting.

He joins Tory leader Russell Findlay in seeking to emulate the chaos unfolding in America.

Labour: archive.is/kAIJ3
Tories: archive.is/G60tA
Headshots of Anas Sarwar and Russell Findlay from today’s article (image credited to PA).
February 21, 2025 at 6:22 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
This rather brilliant example of gender-affirming care is alleged to have been included in an article by an American medical organisation.
Page of an article headed ‘Gender affirming care: surgical and non-surgical’. In the upper right is a photo of two smiling, white, female-presenting people. At the bottom left, there are two photos of Elon Musk, one showing him with a receding hairline and arguably less angular jawline, and one as he is now. These photos are captioned: ‘Gender dysphoria is not limited to transgender people. Many cisgender public figures pursue gender-affirming care. Orthognathic (jawline) surgery and follicular unit (hair) transplants are examples of gender-affirming surgery, while testosterone supplements are non-surgical gender-affirming care.’ The main text begins: ‘Transgender and gender diverse (IGD) people are those whose gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. Cisgender people are those whose gender identity does align with the sex they were assigned at birth. TGD people comprise 0.4% to 2.7% of the U.S. population. Gender-affirming surgery includes a range of procedures that help align a patient's body with their gender identity. Some TGD people choose to have gender-affirming surgery, although not all. The number of patients who seek gender-affirming surgery has increased. It has been shown to improve quality of life, has comparable rates of complications to similar procedures performed for non-gender-affirming indications, and is associated with low rates of regret.’
February 13, 2025 at 3:03 PM
transponderings.bsky.social
Really Google? This is embarrassing.
Google Maps satellite view of the southern United States, Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico. A pin is placed in the bay to the east of Mexico, labelled ‘Gulf of Mexico’ with ‘Gulf of America’ in parentheses beneath it.
February 12, 2025 at 3:26 PM